The click of heels: How online shopping is changing the face of fashion

Online shopping for fashion is no longer about deals. Now, it's driven by convenience and personalization

Online shops such as ShoeMint creats a personalized experience that many are choosing over bricks-and-mortar shopping.

Photograph by: Photo illustration
, National Post

Have you ever heard that expression "from runway to reality?" How about "from runway to inbox?" Last fall The Peacock Parade, a Canadian flash sales site founded by Jan Gandhi and Nancy Sahota, partnered with Canadian fashion labels JUMA and Denis Gagnon to offer pieces hot off the LG Fashion Week runway. Similarly, lingerie retailer La Vie en Rose ran a holiday group buying promotion in December through Buytopia.ca. And Gilt Groupe, the mother of all flash sites, has taken the original flash sales model and expanded it to full-price offerings of men's, women's and children's fashion as well as artisanal food and wine and even a $210,000 vacation villa.

This, it seems, is the future for fashion online: the exclusives are full-price, and you'll probably hear about them on Twitter first.

When she was looking for the next big online thing, Joanna Track (the founder of SweetSpot.ca, who has since sold the company) opted not to go the discount route.

"I have two thoughts on this," she explains. "From a business sense, when I was approached by a friend to get involved in an online retail business, to compete with Gilt and Beyond the Rack, I said no because there are so many of them popping up, and I think the market is saturating.

"Then, there's me as a consumer -- I can't get excited around pushing clearance goods. I'm a brand person, and that's about an aesthetic, an emotional connection. If I'm looking for the exact perfect black dress I want, I don't want to be limited by clearance goods. I want the perfectly curated dress and a superior customer service experience."

Dealuxe, as Track called her new online retail venture, is now nine months old. Instead of last season's leftovers, Dealuxe became one of the first Canadian-based sites to sell in-season contemporary brands and, since its launch, now has 15,000 registered account users, six figures a month in sales and revenues growing 300% from May to November 2011, according to Track.

The initial challenge was that, unlike Americans, who have shopped from afar via catalogue for years, Dealuxe first had to educate and assure Canadian consumers about buying clothing online. "People called with a lot of questions," she recalls. The majority of Dealuxe's sales come from urban centres at lunch hours and before bedtime. "And you say to yourself, well they have access to these stores -- Intermix, Holt Renfrew -- but the appeal of an online store is that they are busy, multi-tasking family and job, and they know what they want." They have recently, however, as a result of media exposure, been getting more orders from small towns across Canada. "That's exciting for us because what we offer the other half is accessibility to brands that women have only read about in magazines, like Jennifer Aniston wearing J Brand."

It helps that the product is accompanied by dynamic, magazine-style editorial content -- a guest editor, outfit tips -- that changes as regularly as the assortment, almost daily.

"What women are looking for is inspirational information," Track says. "I don't expect them to come to my site and shop every single day, but if I can get them to come to my site every day and engage, then yes, they are more likely to buy, eventually."

Track says the site gets about 40,000 unique visitors a month, who stay an average of five minutes.

As the social media world gets more fragmented -- Tumblr, Pinterest, Google+ -- the method of not only talking about but hearing about what retailers are offering is changing. Livedress, a Canadian-based social network for fashion types launched in 2009, released a free iPhone app earlier this week, and enlisted the likes of popular YouTube personality Teresa Ulrich to select (and more importantly, broadcast) her picks for an outfit a day. It's an eclectic mix with potential, mixing companies such as Cougar and Winners (who pay for branded fashion videos created by Livedress), while local boutiques, designers and style civilians can share and participate in a fashion dialogue of their making, unfettered.

But people who are famous on YouTube are one thing, and real celebrities are another. While Gwyneth Paltrow does her GOOP project from on high, more approachable boldface names such as Kate Bosworth and Rachel Bilson are taking their fashion aspirations online.

The two starlets have joined BeachMint, a social commerce site launched by Diego Berdakin and Josh Berman. They launched the retailer in Canada and began shipping orders on Boxing Day (tagline: "Shop Now, eh?"). As of Wednesday, the company raised another $35-million in funding, on a rumoured $150-million valuation.

Anecdotally, Berdakin -- on the phone from their HQ in an area of Santa Monica they refer to as Silicon Beach -- half-jokes that the top customer service complaint since BeachMint's launch was from Canadians who lamented it wasn't available in Canada. For his part, Berman says part of the appeal of celebrity-backed products is aspirational shopping and that regardless of geography, consumers are very interested in what celebrities are doing. In this case, they're creating original product, often with their stylists, exclusively for BeachMint brands.

"First of all you get access," he says. "Not everybody can afford a stylist or facialist or shoe expert. It's bringing that aspiration and expertise to your fingertips, online, having access to the top stylists, so if Kate Bosworth is wearing a certain thing you can, too. Affordably. If you shop at Tiffany, it's the experience; you get the blue box, but we think there's status in the experience and the celebrity part."

One of the important components of BeachMint's customer interaction is that users must complete a personalized profile to help the brand pick the right product for them. This is done by clicking through a series of quizzes alongside redcarpet celebrity images and product, while answering such questions as which celebrity style is most "you." I took the quiz and signed up for ShoeMint, their newly-launched Rachel Bilson and Steve Madden collaboration brand, and my initial options include three starlet blonds: soignée Ashley Olsen in a plunging mini-dress, Jessica Simpson in a colourful retro frock with hair in loose waves and a fresh-faced Kate Bosworth. It's more personalized than compulsively checking or Zappos and pretty competitive on price, about 50 per cent to 80 per cent less than retail.

"I think it comes down to the authenticity of the influencer," Berman says. "We don't just want to find any influencerslash-celebrity but someone who is super-dialled-in and super-excited to bring that brand to market."

Kate Bosworth's JewelMint was BeachMint's first foray, in the fall of 2010. "Her passion to design jewellery and create the jewellery brand makes her so involved." Ditto BeautyMint, a collaboration with Jessica Simpson "It really works with [her]," he continues, "she was in her early twenties and brought Proactiv to the marketplace and now we look at her, 30 and pregnant and about to start a family, but not as concerned with acne but skin maintenance." Excitement, Berman adds, is another big factor in choosing which talent to work with. "With [Bosworth], she's not just her day job; she's super-interested in what's on trend, and we're interested in that whole journey."

Tiffany Elton of Quartier Mode, a new Canadian-focused fashion boutique in Montreal that just launched their online store, doesn't have 100th of BeachMint's capital, but she accomplishes a similar connection to potential customers through the shop's blog.

"There's definitely a price point, but I think it's more about experience for a customer," Elton says. "They want to feel like part of a community and like the backstory of a designer." Quartier Mode's new Design Chronicles series may be low-tech, but it's effective.

"We went into the designers' studios and took pictures of them working. You can get inside their head and see what inspires them," she explains. "The personal connection to the designer makes it more special. I find that seeing the actual person adds a lot of value to the clothing."

The personal connection to who's shilling helps, too. OpenSky, another social shopping site, also relies on trusted curators across design, food and health categories. Curator Kim France, for example, leverages her reputation and customer affection as a former Lucky and Sassy magazine staffer and editor to select product she likes -- and then, as is the OpenSky model, she participates directly in the tangible sales generated on her products from nearly a million registered users.

If all this starts to feel like the Avon direct sales model, well, it is -- only your Avon lady is in the pages of Star every week (or maybe she's editing them).

In some cases, she's even got a social conscience. MyMela, a home decor and fashion site with a social conscience twist (or, as it was explained to me, "the Etsy of India") goes a step beyond even that. MyMela's sales model integrates Micro Advance Funding (IMAF) such that visitors to the site can opt into a more direct relationship with the artisans not only by purchasing their wares but through interest-free loans (for materials, capital improvements or worker training) that are repaid within a few months, with interest.

That the interest comes in the form of credits that can only be spent on MyMela is merely the latest savvy sales twist.

In November, New York coat manufacturer AUI (at division of Utex Inc.) launched a plus-size e-commerce collection called Just As You Are that eschews sizing and uses userinput body measurements to help select the best coat or jacket. Similarly Fitiquette (currently in beta-testing) utilizes a patent-pendingtechnologythat gives users a 360-degree view of the approximated fit and drape of a garment based on their input body dimensions. And at the Consumer Electronics Show earlier this month, Bodymetrics went a step further and previewed a prototype designed to build a personalized virtual fit model using 3D body-scanning technology. With this new online experience (and strong service), once the analytics of virtual fit get perfected, any hesitation about online shopping may be a thing of the past. Perhaps bricks-andmortar stores will be, too.

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